The consensus seems to be that this doesn't qualify as Hacker News, but I tend to think that a large percentage of the users of this board can empathize with this boy. I certainly went through some of this (though not nearly as much, and at a much younger age), and I'm sure a pretty large percentage of today's startup founders and programmers went through similar tormenting at some point for being smart, different, or just unlucky. Thus, this gets a well deserved up vote from me.
Ender didn't win all of his fights. He gets regularly beaten up by his older brother.
Remember this? Ender didn't like how his bullies fought, strong versus weak. He didn't like how he fought, smart versus stupid. And none of it worked with his brother, who is just as smart and much more ruthless. Ender just wanted to be left alone.
What about the Buggers? Weren't they bullying the humans? What happened later when Ender found out the Buggers didn't even know they were killing sentient beings? What was the human response? To get a bigger stick.
What are Billy's parents doing? They are doing what Ender realized couldn't happen in Battle School. He couldn't go to the authorities. He had to finish it on his own.
Why did Billy's sister stopped him from finishing the fight? To win, you have to to win all the fights that come after -- that was what Ender saw. What happened in the trial at the end of the book? Those kids had died. If Billy did that, he would win that fight, and it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Instead of a New York Times article about bullying, we'd have a media fest about another Columbine.
Ender won almost all his fights, but it nearly destroyed him. To win, he had to empathize with the enemy until he loved them. Then he annihilated them. He kept seeing Peter's face in the mirror, until he realized his sister Valentine was always with him. He beat the Giant who kept killing him with those poisoned drinks ... by cheating. And that's when he came to the End of the World.
My point with Ender's Game is not to say that Ender had the solution to this, but rather that the book discussed all the issues people are bringing up here in these comments. In detail. It is too bad it seems so few people have read it or regarded my comment as pointless enough to downmod it. Too bad for them.
